Comparing Business Processes to Determine the Feasibility of Configurable Models: A Case Study

Organizations are looking for ways to collaborate in the area of process management. Common practice until now is the (partial) standardization of processes. This has the main disadvantage that most organizations are forced to adapt their processes to adhere to the standard. In this paper we analyze and compare the actual processes of ten Dutch municipalities. Configurable process models provide a potential solution for the limitations of classical standardization processes as they contain all the behavior of individual models, while only needing one model. The question rises where the limits are though. It is obvious that one configurable model containing all models that exist is undesirable. But are company-wide configurable models feasible? And how about cross-organizational configurable models, should all partners be considered or just certain ones? In this paper we apply a similarity metric on individual models to determine means of answering questions in this area. This way we propose a new means of determining beforehand whether configurable models are feasible. Using the selected metric we can identify more desirable partners and processes before computing configurable process models.